G20 leaders gathered in Brazil on Monday to discuss fighting poverty, boosting climate financing and other multilateral initiatives that could be affected by Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House.
US President Joe Biden will attend his last summit of the world’s leading economies, but only as an impersonator, whom other leaders are already looking beyond.
The show’s main star is expected to be Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has presented himself as a global statesman and defender of free trade in the face of Trump’s “America First” agenda.
Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will use his hosting duties to highlight his support of Global South issues and the fight against climate change.
The summit venue is Rio de Janeiro’s stunning bayside museum of modern art.
Security is tight for the gathering, which is taking place just days after a failed bomb attack on Brazil’s Supreme Court in Brasília by a suspected far-right extremist, who killed himself in the process.
The summit will conclude Biden’s farewell diplomatic tour, which took him to Lima for a meeting of Asia-Pacific trade partners, and then to the Amazon in the first such trip for a sitting US president.
Biden, who has sought to polish his legacy as time winds down on his presidency, has insisted that his climate record will hold up even after another Trump mandate.
spotlight on climate
The G20 meeting coincides with the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, which is stalled over the issue of more climate finance for developing countries.
All eyes are on Rio for success.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called on G20 members, who account for 80 percent of global emissions, to show “leadership and compromise” to facilitate a deal.
A Brazilian diplomatic source said fast-developing countries such as China were rejecting pressure from rich countries to join the financing of global climate projects, but added that they expected progress at the summit.
The meeting comes in a year that has seen yet another extreme weather event, including Brazil’s worst wildfire season in more than a decade, fueled at least in part by record drought. is responsible for climate change.
At the last G20 in India, leaders called for tripling renewable energy sources by the end of the decade, but without explicitly calling for an end to fossil fuel use.
One invited leader who declined to come to Rio is Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose arrest has been sought by the International Criminal Court and who said his presence would “ruin” the gathering.
Lula, 79, told Brazil’s Globonews channel on Sunday that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East would be left off the summit agenda to focus on the poor.
He said, “Because if not, we won’t be discussing other things that are more important to the people who are not at war, who are poor people and invisible to the world.”
taxing billionaires
The summit will open on Monday with Lula, a former steelworker who grew up in poverty, launching a “global coalition against hunger and poverty.”
“What I want to say to the 733 million people in the world who are hungry, the children who sleep and wake up and are not sure whether they will have something to put in their mouths, is this: Nothing today. Yes, but it will happen tomorrow,” Lula said over the weekend.
Brazil is also pushing for higher taxes on billionaires.
Lula had faced resistance from Argentina over parts of his agenda, but on Sunday a Brazilian diplomatic source said negotiators from all G20 members agreed on a draft final statement to be presented to their leaders Were.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
